92-year-old Marine veteran becomes bride’s ‘something blue’

A bride in Missouri got a special gift from her uncle, a 92-year-old Marine World War II veteran: He served as his niece’s “something blue.”

A story on ABC News identified the bride as Alison Ferrell and the uncle as Bill Lee Eblen. Eblen became “something blue” by wearing Marine dress blues to the wedding.

“From the moment I got engaged I knew I wanted to include my uncle Bill in a special way,” Ferrell said via ABC’s story. “I come from a family where we were taught to have the utmost respect and admiration for the armed services and honoring him as the ‘something blue’ just seemed like the natural choice.”

According to ABC, Ferrell asked Eblen to be in her wedding while he was in the hospital with pneumonia. From that point on, he pushed hard to recover and make sure he was at Ferrell’s wedding.

“I immediately started doing more calisthenics, walking more instead of riding my little three-wheel bike,” Eblen told the news organization. “Then all the people around here were talking about, ‘You gotta get back in shape again. You’re laying around on your you-know-what too much.

“I felt elated and honored to be a part of it.”

The family said Eblen no longer had his uniform from World War II, but they were able to piece together a Marine uniform, thanks to a neighbor of Ferrell’s parents.

“Just to putting on that uniform again brought back a lot of great old memories,” he said in the article. “It got me choked up.”